


burn the straw house down

by cryptidgay



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Fix-It, Gen, Groundhog Day, Temporary Character Death, Time Loop, Vanya Hargreeves Needs A Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-10
Updated: 2019-04-10
Packaged: 2020-01-07 15:01:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18413027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryptidgay/pseuds/cryptidgay
Summary: Vanya is on her couch, the post-dawn light stinging at the back of her eyes, and it takes her a moment to remember anything at all. For a second, she exists in a half-asleep haze blissfully free from identity. She did not end the world. She did not kill anyone. She is nobody, and that makes her innocent.And then she’s awake, and the sun through her window is suddenly harsh, and she is staring down at her hands. They don’t glow. This probably shouldn’t come as a surprise, but last she was aware, she was lit up like a brand-new Christmas tree coming to life.Also, she was in a theater. Also, she was not alone.





	burn the straw house down

**Author's Note:**

> a russian doll au.
> 
> content warnings: death, violence, trauma, & dissociation.

There is a long walk in between Leonard’s apartment and Vanya’s. She navigates it as if she is sleepwalking: numbly, disconnectedly. There’s blood on her hands, but they don’t feel like they’re hers, not really — she is someone else, when her eyes go white and the air swirls around her, her own personal hurricane constructed from all the things she has never been allowed to feel. Emotion swept into action. Knives.

There’s blood on her hands. Dimly, she notes that that is more figurative than literal — she was standing pretty far back when the knives flew, and the blood did not burst so much as become trapped within Leonard’s body, knives like bottle corks where they lay. She can conjure up the image in her mind, and she knows that she should feel something about it, the things she has done and the potential for worse she could do.

She doesn’t, not really. It’s like those years on the medication Reginald had prescribed her. She knows what she should feel, but the actual emotion is distant. A ghost of a sensation. Vanya thinks she should be afraid of what she’s done — guilty, like she was with Allison, like she still  _ is  _ with Allison. But the numbness persists as her feet carry her down the empty sidewalk.

It’s dawn when she arrives home.

Vanya sits down on her bed and goes through the motions: unlace one shoe, slip it off, unlace the other, slip it off, unhook her bra from under her shirt and slide that off, too. Comfort is a distant thought, at this point, but her muscle memory persists. This is what one does when one gets home after a long day. Sometimes, that means a rough day of rehearsal, a catty remark from Helen. Sometimes, that long day involves killing your sister and your boyfriend. Same motions.

Her bed feels wrong, though, too soft, and she moves to her couch, and she closes her eyes and opens them and feels that time has passed without any real proof. The sun seems higher in the sky, brighter than it was a moment ago, but she isn’t quite present enough to really take note of that.

This is how it begins. This is how it always begins.

\----

Vanya listens to her voicemail and breaks down. (Oh, Allison. Oh, her voice — and Vanya knows she will never hear that voice again, and it strikes her in the heart like a bowstring. No, like a knife. That’s the saying, isn’t it?)

Vanya takes the bus to the Academy, capital-A. Talks to Luther. Finds forgiveness, for a brief moment, and has it stolen by his too-tight grasp.

Vanya burns it down. First, the Academy, then the theater, and the world. It all crumbles and she doesn’t feel it, not really.

(There’s a twinge of emotion, of  _ something  _ breaking through the nothing, when Allison smiles at her. The surprise that one of her siblings came to watch her play. The pride in Allison’s eyes. The forgiveness. Vanya smiles back, for a moment, before the world goes to shit.)

\----

A shot rings out beside her ear. It isn’t a surprise. Do they think Vanya would have let Allison get so close if she did not want her to?  _ This is not normal. You do not want this.  _ She’s aware of it, even if she’s too disconnected to feel the associated emotions.

The air moves with the gun, with Allison’s hand holding the gun, and Vanya feels it the same way she feels the music around her, the touch of string on string as her violin sings its swan song. 

She closes her eyes. The shot rings out. She falls.

\----

Vanya is on her couch, the post-dawn light stinging at the back of her eyes, and it takes her a moment to remember anything at all. For a second, she exists in a half-asleep haze blissfully free from identity. She did not end the world. She did not kill anyone. She is nobody, and that makes her innocent.

And then she’s awake, and the sun through her window is suddenly harsh, and she is staring down at her hands. They don’t glow. This probably shouldn’t come as a surprise, but last she was aware, she was lit up like a brand-new Christmas tree coming to life.

Also, she was in a theater. Also, she was not alone.

It was a dream, then — a horrible, terrible dream. Maybe everything else was, too.

When she finally sits up, feeling a thousand years older than when she had laid down, she opens her violin case. She’d wanted so badly to believe it was all a nightmare — she used to have those, at the Academy, when she was a kid, would wake up crying about things she can no longer recall.

But there’s her bow in all its bloodstained glory, and she  _ knows  _ whose blood that is. She’s tempted to smash it, to throw her violin across the room and break her bow in half. It would be so easy.

The moment passes, though, quick as it came, and she’s overcome by that accursed numbness that has defined the past twenty-five years of her life. She sobs and gets up and takes a bus to a place she used to call home.

This second day, it is largely the same: she, empty, goes through the motions, and her siblings play their parts, and the world ends in fire, and all is as it shouldn’t be.

\----

The third day, she thinks she understands.

It’s some sort of sick punishment — a well-deserved one, surely, for all of the sins she has committed. Her mental tally of those she’s hurt has gone out the window. Yesterday, it had included the three men in the parking lot, and Allison, and Leonard. Now, there’s Pogo and there’s mom and, oh, seven billion others.

She can’t count that much guilt on her fingers. The thought makes her laugh, but it’s choked and it’s painful and it devolves into tears faster than she could count to seven.

At the orchestra, she had been a shell of herself: take a horrifically lonely girl, subtract feeling, add power, create the apocalypse. (An easy to follow recipe for disaster.) Now, morning-of and morning-after, she is bursting with emotions, tornadoing in her hollow chest and spilling out. Her hands shake, and her legs feel weak when she stands, and her head hurts with unshed rage, and there is so, so much within her, more than there has ever been —

The window in her apartment bursts. Shattering glass sounds like music, except that it doesn’t, and maybe it’s only in her ears that it transforms as such.

Looking back on it, she would love to say that she got her shit together, avoided the apocalypse the first day she had the awareness to do so, and they all lived happily ever after. Vanya Hargreeves is many things, but she has never been a liar — and she can’t lie like that, can’t claim that everything is fine when it so, so clearly is not.

Her thoughts keep returning to that gray room. The spiked walls, the small window, the screams of her current self and her young self equally unheard.

She doesn’t give Luther the chance to be a self-righteous Judas this time. Vanya marches into the Academy with white eyes. He’s afraid, and fear makes you do awful things, but Vanya is terrified.

Or, she was. She can’t really remember the feeling, now, with the marble columns of the Academy crumbling to dust around her.

(Her siblings are in there. She doesn’t stop to see which of them were buried in the rubble. She has a concert to attend.)

Without hours lost in the blank room, she has time to kill before the concert, and she walks the streets in a power-numb daze. The doubt creeps into her periphery — what has she done? What will she do? Who is she, at this point, because it certainly is not Vanya Hargreeves, who cried about ants crushed underfoot and has never shown an ounce of strength? — but it is not the time, so she focuses on the incessant beeping of an automated traffic signal and sends a car flying down the street. That fixes it. The feeling, that is.

Time skips, and Vanya is at the concert. She’s not sure how she’d gotten there. Doesn’t matter. Unimportant.

She pours her soul into the music, feeling the way it ripples the air and smashes the glass of the theater, and the audience is just as enraptured as the orchestra. The conductor’s role is forgotten, for Vanya is conducting them, and this time she will not be stopped.

Five and Allison arrive halfway through the performance. Vanya has been forged in collapsed structures, and she fights hard — light lifts them into the air, and mysterious gunmen (have they always been there? She didn’t notice them, the last two times) shoot at them, and Five falls but Allison is still standing.

Vanya falters, and Allison takes the shot. Neither of them will ever be sure if Vanya’s eyes close on purpose, or if it’s a momentary fluke, a mistake in her perfect show. Third time’s the charm, she thinks to herself, and the light disappears.

\----

Light rushes in — blue light, sunlight, not white incandescence that flows from her own body. Then sound, birds chirping outside, offensively cheerful for the last day of the world. Then emotion.

Vanya remembers the crumbling Academy, the way Luther fell beneath falling bricks, the gash on Allison’s head when she had stood before Vanya at the concert (unsmiling, she remembers, they had not smiled this time, and that feels important) — and god, she feels sick.

One half hour spent leaning over a toilet bowl later, she is not free of her guilt, but she wants to fix it, and that feels like a start. Thirty-six hours of hell is all it has taken to change Vanya’s mind.

Not entirely, of course. She’s angry at all of them — her heartbeat rings loud in her ears at the thought of all that Pogo had hidden from her, at Luther locking her up, at them rushing into her concert to play the heroes when all she’d wanted was to play her song in front of an audience that would give a shit.

She is apocalyptic. That’s a rush as much as it’s the most horrifying thing in the world. Ordinary Vanya — who would have guessed she would be the most powerful of them all? She wouldn’t. She isn’t sure she  _ wants to be _ . All those years spent wishing for this very thing, but no one had ever told her the cost.

The cost is her family’s lives, and those of every other person on Earth. It’s too high a price.

She tries to sit at home, but the near-silence crushes her. It’s never really silent in the city, always people yelling and cars passing and neighbors banging on the walls, but there’s no steady noise to focus her attention on, and that is worse. It’s a quiet cacophony, nothing to channel energy through until it bursts out of her. She’s been an atomic bomb for the last three days, and she’s set and ready to explode.

That’s okay. She takes deep breaths like her therapist taught her six years ago, though she no longer remembers how many seconds she’s meant to hold the breaths for.

Vanya picks up her phone.

The Academy’s number is familiar, though she hasn’t called it in years. When she first moved out, she’d call once a month to check in — mostly, mom or Pogo would answer the phone, and she didn’t mind talking to them. It was worse when Reginald answered, but the conversations with him were always brief, her father entirely uninterested in the direction of her life.

Luther answers this time. Of course he would.

“Hello?” Her voice shakes. She hadn’t expected that.

“Vanya.”

“Shit, I’m— I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Luther.” He’s got no way of knowing the weight of all she’s apologizing for. Luther will assume it’s Allison she’s sorry for — and god, she is, she still is, but there’s so much  _ more  _ now. She’s killed all of them three times over.

“What happened?”

“I— things got out of control. Is she—”

Vanya knows Allison is alright. She’s seen it. But she doesn’t know what else to say, and clearly it’s the question Luther expects her to ask.

“She’s alright. Vanya, why don’t you come home? We can talk here.”

She’s not sure if it was premeditated, her confinement, or if it was a fight-or-flight decision gone wrong. Does he really want to talk face to face, or is it a ploy to trap her again? Would he let her go if he knew what she’d done?

(More terrifying: she isn’t sure if he should.)

One detail catches her, though: when Luther says her name, she can hear him strain against saying Number Seven, childhood instincts still so ingrained by their father that he has to struggle to call her by her actual fucking name. It’s something small, and it certainly isn’t the first time she’s noticed, but it keeps her from making a truly stupid decision.

“I can’t. I’m sorry.”

He protests, but Vanya hangs up the phone, stares at it on its receiver for far too long.

By the time seven o’clock rolls around and the concert begins, she has not wrecked any buildings, has not done much of anything but stare at her hands and wonder what she has become. She thinks that’s what it means to repent.

Her siblings come later, this time. Before intermission, the gunmen arrive, shooting into the crowd. They aren’t aiming at her, and she finds that strange, because she’s glowing and would be such an easy target, standing on the stage controlling the room as she is.

Nobody will be hurt this time. She’s decided that for them all, and the mystery people with their bullets are the ones she attaches herself to, taking the echoing noise of gunfire and turning it into music, then into energy, then back into music. Her hand never leaves her violin, but their hands certainly leave their guns.

Then they come: the Hargreeves, all six of them. Ben’s there. She didn’t take note of that the first two times, but she’s more present now — not entirely here, but half-here, at the very least — and she notices him and she smiles.

Her hand races across the violin. Her siblings seem at a loss in a way she has rarely seen them before. Klaus and Allison and Ben watch her and she can feel their pride, their joy, their sadness. She turns it into part of the song, echoes it back at them. Diego looks lost, hand resting on a knife at his side, as if that will do any good here. Five’s looking at the gunmen with something approaching recognition.

Luther, though — he turns to the rest, and he gives some order, and just then more strangers with guns charge into the room and begin to fire.

It’s a blur, what happens next: she loses herself, she hurts people, same as the first three times, and Luther is the one who takes her down, seizing the moment she had robbed him of by not returning to the Academy.

This time, before she goes dark, she sees it: a flash of light hitting the moon. She’d wondered what had happened. Now she knows.

\----

She tries to be straightforward.

“Klaus,” she says, because he’d picked up the phone this time for some reason. Vanya’s grateful for that. Out of all of them, he’ll understand what it’s like to fear your own power. “I can explain — I can explain everything, I promise. I’m coming to the Academy. Can you meet me outside when I get there? I didn’t mean to hurt Allison, I promise I won’t hurt you, I just need a family meeting and I won’t be able to do that if Luther is the first one who sees me.”

Her voice wobbles through the sentences enough that he takes pity on her. He doesn’t ask questions. Maybe he’s too drunk to care, maybe she just sounds awful enough that Klaus is willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. “‘Course, little sis. I’ll be on the steps.”

“Tell the others — family meeting. I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

He says something affirming, something else about being worried about her, but she’s already cycling through what she could say to convince them, working out a script that will immediately dissolve when faced with her siblings.

Thirty-four minutes later, because bus traffic does not care if you are the oncoming apocalypse herself, she arrives at the mansion’s rusted gates. They creak open, and Klaus is sitting on the stairs as promised, hands resting on his knees.

They hug. It’s comforting in the way Luther’s first hug almost was, forgiveness warm and soothing, but she breaks it before anything can go wrong. Vanya stands back, looks up at her brother, and walks into the house.

She shouldn’t be surprised that it is still in one piece, but she’s seen it in ruins enough times now that she has to stare. The balcony hasn’t fallen. The paintings still line the walls, pristine and depressing.

“They’re all in the living room. Better not keep ‘em waiting too long; Luther looked like his head was gonna explode, last I checked, and that was twenty minutes ago. Might’ve gone  _ splat  _ all over the wall by now.” Klaus is trying to be funny, trying to soothe his sister’s nerves the same way he did when they were kids, but she can imagine all too vividly what it would be like to see Luther’s head crumble, and she grimaces at the thought.

Vanya takes a deep breath, and she enters.

The room erupts immediately — Luther has dropped the facade of care, has gone straight for shouting, and Diego is trying to rein him in, and Allison is looking at Vanya with her wide eyes and not saying anything and damned if that doesn’t make Vanya want to cry. Everyone is talking over each other, and it swirls and swirls and takes root in her ribcage, the sound growing until it escapes.

The lightbulbs in the chandelier burst and the room plunges into darkness and silence. Only the sunlight from the high-up windows casts their faces into dim relief. More deep breaths. She will not allow it to collapse today.

“Sorry. I’m sorry — for the lights, just now, and Allison, I’m so sorry, I never meant to hurt you, I  _ swear _ .” She’s never had the chance to apologize to Allison properly in the last four days, and her regret floods out of her. To all of them, now, she apologizes once more: “I’m so, so sorry.”

Vanya is the last one standing, raised taller than her siblings for just a moment. There’s a spot on the couch beside Allison, but she’s not sure if she has a right to it. She keeps standing.

“That isn’t why I’m here, though. I mean — it’s part of it. But not all of it.”

“I’ve been here before,” she starts, and Diego snorts.

“All of us have, sis. Grew up here, if you remember.”

“No, that’s not what I mean. I mean, today. This morning. I woke up on my couch, and yesterday I was at the cabin, and I — fucked up,” she looks down, avoiding Allison’s gaze, “and I woke up this morning. Except it isn’t the first time I did. I’ve done today before. I know that sounds crazy, but I swear, it’s the truth.”

Allison’s scribbling in a notepad. Vanya didn’t notice she was carrying one till now, and the realization stings. She holds it up, and Luther reads it aloud, as if he’s the only one who can decode her handwriting. It isn’t difficult. He just likes being in control.

“How many times?” Allison says, through her pen and through Luther.

There was the first time, and the echo of that, and the one where she had destroyed what would destroy her, and the one where she was passive and still lost, in the end. “This is the fifth.”

“That’s insane,” Luther starts. Allison smacks his arm at the same time Klaus and Diego glare at him. He quiets.

“Trust me, I know.”

“What happened the other times?” That’s Klaus, and he sounds worried about her, which is crazy, because she’s created more ghosts now than he’ll ever have a chance to see. Right now, though, she doesn’t feel like the woman who stood on stage and ended the world without remorse. She feels like a child. It’s this place, or it’s the feeling of them all looking at her, or it’s the guilt. Whatever it is, she feels too young, too small to deal with all of this alone.

She’s silent for too long, and eventually settles on two words. “Bad things.” It’s not enough to sum up what she’s done, but any more and they would hate her. Any elaboration would make Luther lock her in that room again, and she  _ cannot _ do that.

Allison, writing again:  _ Where’s five? _ He’d know how to deal with this — it reeks of time travel, and though he is no star in that subject, he’s certainly the most qualified among them.

But Vanya looks around as everyone shrugs, and she’s not sure where she imagined this going, but it was not this — her siblings looking at her as if she should have some kind of plan.

She wants to scream.  _ You’re the heroes. Do something. Make this stop. _ She looks down at her shoes instead, notices little splatters of blood against the brown leather, and she isn’t sure if it’s Leonard’s or Allison’s but it makes her nauseous nonetheless.

It is quickly apparent that she has no plan, and everyone starts speaking at once again — Luther is dancing around the suggestion to subdue Vanya, arguing that they don’t know the strength of her power and she clearly isn’t telling them something, as if she isn’t right there next to him. Allison is writing quickly, but by the time she holds up her notebook the conversation has moved past whatever she’d written, and her eyes clench shut in frustration. Klaus is on Vanya’s side, but is also talking about an apocalypse his tarot cards had showed him, and seems to be connecting some dots that should remain unconnected. Diego is on whatever side Luther isn’t on, as per usual, and it seems incidental at most that that is Vanya’s side.

Luther is Number One. Luther is used to getting his way, and he’s afraid, angry. Long story short: he charges at her, and she burns the Academy again, and weeps among the ashes when it is over.

Vanya never makes it to the concert, just breathes in the smoke and panics and destroys and wakes up.

\----

It seems hopeless by the sixth day. She tries to stay at her apartment, cover herself with a blanket and sob the day away, but Diego shows up looking for her.

“We’re all worried about you,” he says from outside her door. She doesn’t answer, and ten minutes later, he’s climbed the fire escape and has come in through her window. Vanya knows what their worry amounts to now.

“I’m sorry,” she says. It’s the fiftieth time she’s apologized, but it’s the first time he’s heard it.

“I know,” Diego says, and he hugs her, and it seems like it’s going to be okay until he says that Luther had told him to bring her back to the Academy.

“No,” Vanya says. Her heartbeat quickens, thunders. She distantly notes dust falling from the ceiling, the room shaking in time with her hands. Diego takes a step back.

“V-Vanya,” he starts, and she goes blank.

\----

Vanya has spent a week reliving the apocalypse — her personal apocalypse, the unbecoming of everything she is, and the wider-scale end of the world — and she is sick of it. It crushes her chest. Moonshards fall and buildings crumble and she blinks and she’s back on her sofa, the arm of it digging into her neck.

“Fuck.”

It’s a habit, a ritual, at this point. She cries for what she had lost the previous day. She cries for what she has lost in the past week-and-change. The damage she’s done, the worse things that she’s bound to do. It seems like an inevitability at this point — what more can Vanya try? Everything she does ends in tragedy.

Maybe father was right to keep her drugged up and neutral. Maybe it would all be for the better if she had never discovered her power. Vanya, ordinary and numb forever — she never thought that would seem like such a dream.

(She doesn’t think she could stand one more day of that. Even now, the pharmacy has a prescription for her pills on file, and Vanya could march in there and get a refill easy as that. She doesn’t. She doesn’t even entertain the thought.)

If it’s inevitable as all that, she thinks, she may as well have her concert. It’s been a few days, and she picks up her violin as if it belongs to a stranger, wipes Allison’s blood from her bow as she has so many times before.

Vanya pleads with the universe. It can all end. Just give her one moment that is hers. That’s all she’s ever wanted: to be worthy of love, to be good enough at something that her family could not help but care for her. To play her violin in front of an audience and have eyes on her, feeling what she feels.

She calls the Academy, passes on her apologies to Allison through Luther, unsure if they’ll ever reach her sister’s ears. It’s the least she can do. 

Something close to hope flutters in her stomach, and she hesitates before hanging up. “You don’t have to, but. I have a concert tonight. Seven pm, the Icarus Theatre downtown. I, uh, reserved seats for all of you, before everything happened. I know I’ve messed up a lot, and everything’s gotten so complicated but — it’d mean a lot if you came.”

As her supportive siblings, she thinks but does not say. Not as attackers, not trying to steal the one thing that belongs solely to her. As people who care about her.

It might be too much of a fantasy. Vanya’s honestly not sure what she can count on as real anymore — for all she knows, the past seven days have been an unending nightmare, and she is still locked in that room with no escape.

She hangs up before Luther has a chance to answer. It’s pure cowardice; she’s afraid to hear her brother reject her again.

Vanya spends a few hours practicing. She’s careful — she wears headphones to mute the sound of her violin, breathes in deeply every time the noise echoes too much around her insides, stops when the floor starts to rumble beneath her. It’s so tempting to let everything fall once more, to hope that she will not wake up this time. Call of the void, or whatever. Ben mentioned that theory once, she thinks.

She wonders if Klaus will bring Ben to watch her play. If Klaus is there. If any of them are there.

She keeps practicing until her hands ache. By then, it’s time to go to the concert. Vanya pulls on her tux, paints her eyes dark, and swipes her metrocard on the bus as if this moment isn’t a harbinger of what’s to come.

The bus driver is the same. Dimly, somewhere in the back of her mind, she’d catalogued his face.

Vanya is careful. She plays beautifully, she shatters the windows and holds the audience’s gaze on her, she glows — but she blinks hard whenever she begins to lose herself in it, and it’s just this side of too much.

When the lights come up for intermission and Vanya’s personal light dims the slightest bit, newly-white suit (and when did that happen? Did that always happen?) stark against the black uniforms around her, she looks into the crowd.

Front row. Five seats filled, plus the flicker of a blue figure behind Klaus.

Vanya is so happy she could weep. She wipes tears from her eyes with her sleeve, and she and Allison exchange smiles.

If the world ends now, Vanya thinks, at least she could die happily. Oh, the guilt still eats at her, and she has no doubt it will for a long time — but in this timeline, in this brief moment, her siblings have come to watch her play, and all is as it should be.

The concert ends. Vanya is absolutely exhausted; she climbs off the stage, not bothering to exit through the wings, and wraps Allison in a tight hug, whispers her apologies into her sister’s shoulder. The rest try to join the hug, surround her, but Vanya shakes her head. (Memories: Luther’s arms squeezing around her too tightly; the claustrophobia of dimly lit rooms.)

Klaus tries to talk her into coming back to the Academy with them, Allison nodding along in agreement, but Vanya needs her own bed. “I’ll come by tomorrow — I know there’s a lot to talk about, and we will, I promise,” she says. 

It’s the first time in a week she’s felt confident in a tomorrow, Vanya realizes once the words have left her lips.

Vanya walks home. It’s a long walk, but the night air is brisk and she continues to glow, like a lightning bug at the end of summer, fading but present. She lights her own path, and replays today’s events — not yesterday’s, not the past six days, but today — in her mind until she is collapsing into her bed.

\----

When Vanya blinks her eyes open, she is not on her couch. That should be a success.

Unfortunately, she’s standing up, outside, in front of a row of televisions. There’s a date and time on the ticker tape, but more pressing is the headline: her father’s death.

God, that feels like a thousand years ago. But it’s only two weeks ago, and it’s now.

She sits on the sidewalk, violin case gripped tightly in her hands, until a teenage cashier comes out from the store and asks if she’s alright — yes, she says, she’d just felt lightheaded for a second, but she’s fine. There’s a million thoughts running through her mind, under the hazy pressure of the medication that she’d nearly forgotten the feeling of. Had she gone wrong somewhere? She’d avoided the apocalypse. Problem solved! Everyone go home! Except she’s back further, reset button pressed once more —

And she’s been given the chance to fix everything.

Here’s how it goes: Vanya emails Leonard from the address she uses for her violin students, cancels their lesson. She’s come down with the flu, she says.

Vanya lessens the dose of her medication, bit by bit, until she is off of it and can feel again. When her powers manifest, she calls a family meeting, eyes flashing white as the chandeliers shake but do not fall, and she laughs like bells.

Allison never gets hurt. The Academy never crumbles. There’s a shouting match with Pogo, Vanya never explaining how she’d found out about his lies, but he is genuine in his remorse. He was controlled by Reginald just as much as the rest of them. Forgiveness is a difficult thing, but she’ll get there, she says. Give her time.

It’s easy enough to drop hints, warn them of things to come without making them think she’s some kind of psychic. Five warns of the apocalypse, and she tells him what’s happened, because he knows that time is a fickle beast and will believe her. She promises to tell him if she feels any urges to end the world. None of them are home when the masked duo attacks the Academy, because they’re at Red Lobster having a family dinner for the first time ever. It isn’t so simple to repair decades of trauma, to sew her broken family back together — but it is a start.

On Friday, Allison helps Vanya do her makeup before the concert. When Vanya looks down from the stage, she sees her siblings in the front row. She smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> \- comments fuel me! i haven't written fic in a while, so i'd really appreciate any feedback!  
> \- you can find me @dealwarlock on tumblr or @BlGFOOTS on twitter if you wanna chat.  
> \- title's a line from richard siken's "straw house, straw dog", which doesn't have much relevance to this fic, but i found it a fitting quote.  
> \- vanya's a lesbian and i love her a lot.


End file.
